Saturday, December 22, 2007

If indeed the French and many others fell so offended by the incorporation of “anglo-saxon” (as if there’s such a thing) words into their language, and think it dangerous to learn the “lingua franca” of global exchange, diplomacy, and ideas, then they need to find something that all EUvians can agree on as a middle ground, and offer up something the rest of the world will embrace as a satisfying challenge. Something historically appropriate to the blessed continent of eternal peace… something of their own invention.

I propose Latin. If you want to walk the walk, you gotta talk the talk (as it were).

Imagine the novelty! The entire sickly cartel, nearly-continent in size, run by priests, nuns, and a handful of squirrelly, verbally combative, and indecisive middle age scholars in corduroy and other peculiar garments. In fact it will be just like the old days when there were plagues and mercenaries.

What a world-beating notion - especially when Putin stares them down to shake the change out of their pockets.

Just like the heady days of Sputnik! In France, they’re finally thinking of the consumer in the land where any and all business is stitched up to serve the population as poorly as possible:

France is moving a step closer to allowing shopping on Sundays, with Parliament within the week expected to take up a measure that would permit all furniture stores to stay open on the country's traditional day of rest.

Friday, December 21, 2007

French entrepreneur in Silicon Valley gets a can of whup ass opened up all over his bright new start-up. French entrepreneur gets uppity and calls the tech reviewer a racist. Unfortunately for the French entrepreneur, the tech reviewer is well connected and the French entrepreneursurrenders. Tech reviewer then swamps and KOs French entrepreneur's start-up's Crackerjack box servers with a grand total of 10 video uploads.

There’s an insult German drivers have that either involves tapping your finger on your forehead (to tell someone that they’re an airhead,) or waving your hand in front of your eyes to tell someone that they’re like a horse with blinders on (and is an idiot).

The lefty poodles at Rue89.com deserve both. They’ve run a piece on how the East Germans were extorting cash out of the West Germans to give citizens their freedom, and that the money wasn’t trickling down to comrade ditchdigger.

Even in the DDR this was common knowledge in the early 80’s. Thankfully Rue89.com has permitted this bit of enlightenment to finally see some air 18 years after the wall came down, and only about 35 years after the commies’ racket started, including getting the hard-working taxpayers of the BRD to pay for the construction of the Autobahns that went to West Berlin, and comprised more than half of the DDR’s expressways. What might be more telling was how they built them: with cobblestone on and off ramps, just as it was under Hitler’s specs, but depending even more heavily on manual labor.

The question really is when will the Rue89 dopes charge past the Grenztruppen of their minds and finally see the sign “Sie verlassen jetzt den DDR”?

Thursday, December 20, 2007

From degree programs in Social Engineering to degrading into a sort of haven for socially awkward but violent outré lefty Animal Farm types, Antioch College is finally giving up the ghost.

Of the eight student organizations currently listed on Antioch's website, only one, the Antioch Environmental Group, is not focused on identity politics of one sort or other. The others are By Any Means Necessary for students of African descent, Unidad for Latinos, the Third World Alliance, Kehilla (formerly the Jew Crew) for Jews, two separate groups for gays and lesbians (the Queer Center and Queers of Color), and the Womyn's Center. (The spelling looks like another Saturday Night Live parody, but it is in fact the center's official orthography, although "wombmen" is also in current use on campus.) The only Antioch College students who do not have a campus organization listed in their name are white, heterosexual, non-Jewish males. Traditional college clubs centered around student interests--say, French or music or film or chess or debate--seem to be entirely lacking. Even the events featured for this fall's "Community Day" on October 16--an Antioch tradition in which classes are suspended to accommodate student hayrides and other social events--seemed obsessively focused on identity. The evening events, for example, consisted of a queer lecture followed by a queer movie followed by a dance to the music of a queer band--leaving one wondering what Antioch's non-queers were supposed to do with themselves.

Enjoy. Watch it smolder. After the dominant student culture resembled militant intolerance, and thus looking an awful lot like dominaition, what else could one hope for other than for the entire thing to “go out in style”?

Although political views at Antioch might have tilted leftward even back then, the students of the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s prided themselves on their willingness to hear out their more conservative classmates in lively all-night dorm discussions on politics and philosophy, inspired by professors who encouraged them to test all their assumptions against the evidence. "We were completely respectful of every point of view," recalled Rick Daily, a Denver lawyer who graduated from Antioch in 1968 and is treasurer of the alumni committee that is struggling to save the college from closure. "We even had a Goldwater Republican in our graduating class," Daily said in a telephone interview.

That was Antioch then. Antioch now might be fairly represented by a September 21 article in the student newspaper, the Record, consisting of a gloating account of the invasion by 40 gay and lesbian Antioch students (a full fifth of the current student body) of an evangelical Christian book-signing event at a Barnes & Noble store located in a mall in nearby Beavercreek, Ohio. Record reporter Marysia Walcerz described the hours-long "Gay Takeover," whose participants wore rainbow-tinted bandannas, ostentatiously held hands and kissed, and did their best to shock both authors and customers in this socially conservative sector of Ohio, as a "success . . . for direct action executed in style."

Regardless of their presceient trendsetting in 2000 that would inspire Paris’ City Hall years later in asking murderer Mumia Abu Jamal (née Wesley Cook) to address their graduating class (calling him a “political prisoner” for reasons that only the most inventive and mendacious could gin up), their prospects do map out the future of the “radical” left: dumbed further and further down as the reality of events in the world are kept further at bay, and dumbed further and further down as they try to engage with the reality of events in the world. Toast some marshmallows while you’re at it.

A little something for that tender little revolutionary in your life. Give Snoogums two perfectly matched boxed CD sets sure to provide more of the endless repetition EUvians have been babbling to themselves since 1917.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Before the “U.S. smogging civilization out” meme is repeated for the n-th time by the bien pensent who think that nature (which just is) is really either a philosophy, an new reason to believe in rationing and redistribution, in or a tree in the sidewalk - should read this before they go jump in a lake:

The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto. Below are the growth rates of carbon dioxide emissions, from 1997 to 2004, for a few selected countries, all Kyoto signers. (Remember, the comparative number for the U.S. is 6.6%.)

That’s right – that industrial cipher, Luxembourg where their ridiculous wealth is a result of being a parasitic bank and tax haven investing other people’s hard earned money, and basically being a member of as many morally vane alphabet-soup international organizations as is possible.

In fact all it’s about is hearing the sound of your own voice, and the social coercion:

Last week, two newspaper columnists called for a return to the kind of social coercion only ever seen before in wartime. It's all for the sake of "the environment", but as we'll see - it's a very peculiar and selective version of environmentalism.

Singer Thom Yorke told The Observer: "Unless you have laws in place, nothing's going to happen," he said.

"Nothing of this is going to be voluntary. [sic] It's a bizarre form of rationing that we're all going to have to accept, just like people did in the Second World War."

It's the War On CO2, of course, and Radiohead will be doing "their bit".

As for applying any of these “warm and fuzzy” strictures to the anyone other than those that are symbolic of the “developed world” in the limited intellects of the campaigning activist in need of an emotional outlet, Christmas, unlike the Berlin Love Parade, the Glastonbury Festival, or anything else celebrated by one of the flavor of the week coddled social factionsbecomes fair game.

It is claimed the UK's love of the traditional turkey dinner will generate 51,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Academics calculated the production, processing and transportation costs of the festive ingredients.

They arrived at the total emissions figure by assuming one third of the UK population eats a typical Christmas meal.

The slaughtering of sheep in Brussels or any other colonized city need not apply because of the lunacy of people being little more than symbols to designated “social thinkers” of the day who have a monopoly on what ideas are permitted to be promoted out there. Seem like you’re from the developing world, even if you’ve grown up in Minneapolis? That’s okay. The smart money says that that little feature of the genetic lottery matters more than what people say or think in the world view of the cultural left – the same one whose emissions growth are 3 times higher that the “Kyoto deniers” they like to berate.

We’ll just leave them to those confused do-gooders to their nocturnal emissions while we take the real challenges in the world seriously.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

This couple answers the questions lefties ask about the Jihad: “why do they hate us”

The couple, known just as 'Johan' and 'Jenny', say they registered their marriage in a ceremony in the 'BjornSocialist Republic'. This, they say, is an independent Marxist state, located "on a stone that looks like a tractor", in front of the Bos Islands in Lake Immeln in Skåne, southern Sweden.

The republic, they say, is the smallest in the world, with a land area of 6-8 square metres, a national anthem, a president and ministers, including a minister for 'Enlightenment and Insight.'

The couple applied in August for the Swedish tax authority to recognize the marriage. The application was turned down on the grounds that the republic was not recognized by Swedish law.

The question should really by, why shouldn’t we hate them. They were refused on a point of law, not that they lied to the court by trying to declare a fictitious nation. Who knows – maybe it’s a joke about Marxism, but given that Marxist love taxes but want to evade them anyway, I’d think that they show that same incapacity for irony that bedevils the average revolutionary who has a summer home.

They live in a culture that doesn’t seem to know what to make of people who either a) want to be liberated, or b) kill people who want to be liberated.

Assyrian professor Fuat Deniz, of the University of Örebro, was stabbed in the back of the neck at 3.30 AM on Tuesday and has been declared brain-dead. Swedish police have collected a description of the suspect, who remains at large, from witnesses and have a picture of him from a surveillance camera from a local store.

The 45-metre (148-foot) elk, or moose in north America, is the brainchild of Thorbjörn Holmlund, who recently received permission from Arvidsjaur and Skellefteå councils to begin construction of the wooden animal.

[ ... ]

The area would be better served by investment in eco-tourism, they argue, rather than the construction of roads leading to an enormous elk on the top of a mountain.As we all know, eco-tourists don’t travel, stay in hotels, use camp sites, eat, or defecate.